Books: From gravy to an early grave

DIRTY BUSINESS: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice by Peter Pringle, Aurum pounds 16.95

PEOPLE WHO use airports more than I do will know if anyone has written a holiday-fodder novel about the tobacco business. Entitled Fags or Tropic of Lung Cancer, this smoking and screwing epic would rake over the ashes of the nicotine industry. There is no sex in Dirty Business (unless you maintain that smoking itself is a substitute) but otherwise we have our story - much better written than the usual Barbara Taylor Archer or Danielle Francis.

Peter Pringle, veteran reporter and author of books on nuclear nastiness, has turned to another area where there's no smoke without fire. He brings us a battle as big as that fought by any smoker trying to give up an 80-a-day habit: the legal contest of liability lawyers versus tobacco. The result is a detailed, readable and important account of a farce as black as the lungs of a lifetime addict.

Is it astonishing that America, a nation where citizens sue each other for not saying "Good morning" promptly enough, should have found it so difficult to extract money out of companies which have been killing them off for decades? Hardly, given the money that US tobacco companies have to play with. The Philip Morris payroll is massive enough to afford Margaret Thatcher to help its export drive to Kurdistan. Tobacco cash flooded both Republican and Democratic coffers, switching more to Republicans as the Democrats began expressing concern about the death toll of smokers. Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole received almost half a million dollars in tobacco-related contributions, and remarked that nicotine might be no more dangerous for some people than milk. (The USA must have some lethal cows.)

The nicotine mongers of the USA hurled cash by the wheelbarrow-load at the legal cases in which they were embroiled. For anyone taking them on, it was like lighting cigars with $100 bills.

One company, defending itself from a non-smoker who claimed that passive inhalation had given him lung cancer, investigated other possible factors such as his wife's gravy mixture. Another firm, defending itself from a long-time user, also invested in a team of private detectives - to check out the potential jurors. It hired five of the state's law firms, security staff, and a wing of the local motel . Fortunately, the plaintiff found a lawyer to act on a contingency fee. Unfortunately, the lawyer died before the trial started.

The main attribute of the defendants in this case was their brass nerve. Their former chairman declared that the idea of cigarettes being a health hazard had never occurred to him. Admittedly, this was as long as 10 years ago, a mere 30 years since the British government's acceptance of the link between cancer and the weed; but one would have thought that the subject might have cropped up in conversation occasionally. Perhaps he should have had a chat, or squeak, with the 100,000 Yorkshire mice which, in experiments of a UK industry committee set up in 1962, learnt the hard way that there is a link between lighting up and early graves.

In the USA, research has often been shielded by a heavy-tar smoke screen. A leading merchandiser of nicotine concealed its crucial papers in secure conditions on their lawyers' premises. A law student, earning a few dollars by sorting out documents, discovered secret funds set aside for sponsoring fag-friendly research and censoring the unhelpfully scientific variety. The student began smuggling the more inflammatory of the documents out of the building in his shirt, crunching crisps loudly to drown the sound of paper rustling around his chest-hairs. The information later turned up in a university library and on the Internet, not to mention a CD-ROM, and had a starring role in major lawsuits.

The tobacco barons cautiously entered into negotiations with the tobacco serfs - that is, the anti-smoking lawyers. Between bouts of coughing, Washington joined in. But as the American cigarette industry begins in a tiny way to be stubbed out, brand new markets in the Third World are waiting with open mouths - and lungs.

`Cigarette No. 69, New York' 1972, is one of nearly 200 photographs in Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (Little, Brown pounds 40). This catalogue, edited by Colin Westerbeck, celebrates the gift of Penn's professional archives to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. He began his career as a graphic artist, and whilst at Vogue developed his photographic skills. Contributions by Rosamond Bernier, Edmund Carpenter, Colin Eisler, Martin Harrison and Jennifer Janauskas reflect on the importance and influence of his work in portraiture, fashion, nudes, still life, advertising and ethnographic photography. Issey Miyake pays tribute to him as his `sounding board', someone whose photographs of Miyake's clothing offer him an objective view that `singles out the essence of the design'.